When Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater roared onto a stage, listeners were startled by what they saw and heard.

As if his gutsy guitar playing and growling vocals weren’t enough, Clearwater loved to wade into the crowd or don his beloved Indian headdress or duck-walk across the stage in homage to his early hero, Chuck Berry.

He offered his singular brand of showmanship for the last time on May 19, when he played to a packed house at Buddy Guy’s Legends, in the South Loop, said his longtime friend and publicist, Lynn Orman Weiss.

“He was in true form that night,” said Orman Weiss of the two sets Clearwater performed. “His guitar playing was nonstop. He started at 11 p.m. and went all the way till 2 in the morning, closing time.”

Clearwater died of heart failure Friday in his Skokie home at age 83, according to Orman Weiss and Alligator Records, a Chicago label for which Clearwater recorded.

“Eddy was one of the premier West Side Chicago blues musicians of his generation, along with people like Magic Sam, Otis Rush and Freddie King,” said Bruce Iglauer, founder and president of Alligator Records.

“He was really the last of the generation of West Side guitar players who modernized the blues in the 1950s and very much carried on their legacy, performing not only his own original songs but also songs by Magic Sam and Otis Rush in particular. He never got quite as much acclaim as the others, but he was definitely in the same league.”

Said Chicago blues musician Lurrie Bell, “His singing was great, and I liked his style of playing lead guitar — the way he chorded. His chord progressions were unusual.”

A great deal about Clearwater’s art was unorthodox, for he created an eclectic music from the Southern roots he shared with so many blues artists who migrated to Chicago in the middle of the 20th century, as he did.

Like them, Clearwater — born Edward Harrington in Macon, Miss., on Jan. 10, 1935 — grew up in rural poverty and was beguiled by the music around him.

“I used to hear my uncles singing blues while they were working in the fields,” he told the Tribune in 2011. “And I would ask them: ‘What does that song mean? Like the “Catfish Blues”?’

“It’s about the human condition. They were singing while working and plowing and picking cotton and pulling corn. I would try to imitate what they were singing. Then, later on, my uncle (Rev. Houston Harrington) bought a guitar, and once in a while he’d let me pick it up and see if I could make chords. I was about 10 or 11 years old. I’d hear my uncles do stuff, and I’d be able to figure out little notes and melodies.”

In this way he taught himself to play the guitar, “left-handed and upside down,” as Orman Weiss put it.

When his uncle opened a country cafe with a jukebox, “I heard Louis Jordan sing and play, (and) I could see him onstage, I could visualize him,” Clearwater recalled. “And I said to myself at that point, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be a guitar player or a singer.’ I had to be about 12 or 13.”

The family moved to Birmingham, Ala., in 1948, when he was 13, and in 1950 the nascent musician headed to Chicago (at his uncle’s invitation). He toiled as a dishwasher and crooned in gospel groups, soon working West and South side blues clubs as Guitar Eddy. He cut his first singles, “Hill Billy Blues” and “A-minor Cha Cha,” in the late 1950s on his uncle’s Atomic H label as Clear Waters — an obvious response to the fame of Muddy Waters — which eventually became Clearwater.

The rock ’n’ roll revolution of Chuck Berry galvanized Clearwater, who studied the master’s work closely.

“Lonnie Brooks used to say that at one point he sounded more like Chuck Berry than Chuck Berry did,” said Chicago blues musician Billy Branch, referring to the Chicago blues legend who died last year at age 83.

That distinguished Clearwater from many colleagues, as did his embrace of his Native American heritage.

“I’ve always been very fond of the American Indians, and I happen to be part Indian, anyway — Cherokee,” Clearwater told the Tribune in 2014. “My grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee.

“I was playing at a club in Westmont (in the 1970s), there was a bartender … and she invited me and my band to her house one night for a party after the club had closed. So we went by, and I walked in her house, and hanging up in her den she had a headdress, a full elegant headdress.”

Clearwater immediately asked to buy it, but the woman instead gave it to him as “a good luck charm,” he recalled.

It appeared to work its powers, for in 1980 Clearwater released his first full-length LP, “The Chief” (on Chicago’s Rooster Blues Records label), the album launching him as an international artist.

Clearwater clearly had evolved well beyond his early Chuck Berry impersonation to incorporate rockabilly, R&B and more.

“I’d take a little bit of this pattern and style and try and put it with something else, blend it together to see if it fits,” he said in the 2011 Tribune interview.

It surely did, Clearwater binding these disparate influences through force of personality and exuberance of performance manner. He went on to record more than 15 albums as leader. “Rock ’N’ Roll City” (on Bullseye Blues & Jazz, 2003) earned a Grammy nomination for best traditional blues album; “West Side Strut” (Alligator, 2008) inspired extended international touring.

“Soul Funky,” recorded live at SPACE in Evanston (for Clearwater’s Cleartone label, 2014) was his last album.

To the end, Clearwater never tired of the recording studio, the stage or his audience.

On the eve of a 79th birthday show at SPACE that became the “Soul Funky” album, he marveled at the durability of his career.

“Before I reached 79, I never thought about it too much,” Clearwater told the Tribune.

“Now that I’ve reached the age, I figured, I guess I’m still playing at 79. I’m still enjoying it.

“It feels good to still be on the stage and hopefully making someone happy.”

Clearwater is survived by his wife, Renee Greenman Harrington Clearwater; children and grandchildren. Services will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday at Chicago Jewish Funerals, 8851 Skokie Blvd., Skokie.